Hands –on Assignment 5: Applying the Learning

As a teacher with the Calgary Separate School District (CSSD) my reach is to about
100 students taking robotics courses each semester. I also mentor teachers that
request assistance with setting up a robotics program. Currently, I am the only teacher
with CSSD who has formalized education and industry experience in this subject matter.
There are over 53000 students enrolled at 105 schools with CSSD1. In the industrial
robotics market in 2014 there was 29% growth2. We are underserving our district
student population by not offering robotics technology courses to a wider audience.
Motivation for enrolling in ETEC565G was to gain insight and tools to enable creation of
a culturally competent virtual learning environment for both students and teachers to
allow for expansion of the robotics program throughout the school district.
In the development of a virtual learning environment, a framework must be constructed
that is sensitive to the diverse student and teacher groups that will be using it. The
insights of three authors encountered in the ETEC565G course, Charles Ess, Leah P.
Macfadyen, and Anne Hewling, were of interest towards this end.
Ess’s cultural competence based on a renaissance model would enable one to
effectively and without bias communicate in virtual environments. By being “… fluent in
and can comfortably negotiate among multiple cultures and communication styles” 3, the
renaissance person interacts with others virtually without the threat of cultural
colonization. Having the ability to be empathetic to the other’s culture and
communication style would present a low anxiety communication environment. In Ess’s
forward with Fay Sudweeks in New Media and Intercultural Communocation Identity,
Community, and Politics, these authors write there must be an interdisciplinary
collaboration to fully comprehend the complexities relating to culture, technology, and
communication4. Collaboration among virtual infrastructure experts is vital to build the
course. The team must be cognisant of all stressors from a learner’s perspective,
including the effect of virtual environment on the culturally diverse learner. In the book
Learning Cultures in Online Education, Ess points out in his chapter, When the Solution
Becomes the Problem: Cultures and Individuals as Obstacles to Online Learning, that
“…when we deal with one another as embodied beings […] we engage with one
another as distinctive human beings first, not simply as tokens for overly simple
and overly generalized accounts of cultures and subcultures.”5
Here Ess states the very essence of virtual communication is to remember that even
though the other is not face-to-face, they are still human beings and as such they are
due the same consideration we give the present person.
Macfadyen builds on Ess’s assertion that one’s virtual presence is that of an embodied
person. She states that
 “…virtual learning environments allow learners to extend not just their minds, but
also their bodies and senses, outside themselves and into new relations with the
social worlds they encounter in virtual spaces.”6
Further, “…students in this virtual learning environment demonstrate vividly their
adaptation to the new embodied practices of the virtual classroom.”6. This highlights that
if there is an opportunity for the student to experience an actualized embodied virtual
experience, they will fully invest in the educational experience. Macfadyen also supports
Ess’s contention that one who approaches the virtual experience with a renaissance
perspective will not lose their ethnicity, but rather they will co-exist in the virtual world7.
With this mindset, students will not become homogenized culturally, but rather add to a
rich cultural virtual community that is embraced by all. In the article, Negotiating
Cultures in Cyberspace: Participation Patterns and Problematics, Reeder Macfadyen et
al (2004) present preconditions necessary for successful online communication. If the
communicative style is positive, participant structure is suitable, and genre fits the
application, then the degree of communicative success will be correspondingly high 8.
Using these as checklist items when designing a VLE ensures that the selected course
components contribute to the success of the virtual student.
In her article expositing message analysis as a method to gain insight into the
negotiation of culture in online learning environments9, Hewling demonstrates how
culture in a virtual space is constantly evolving through the varied interactions of
participants. In the article, an analysis of messages from an online course illustrated
how messages posted negotiate the cultural space. In her chapter in the book Learning
Cultures in Online Education, titled “Technology as 'Cultural Player' in Online Learning
Environments”, Hewling supports Ess and Macfadyen, agreeing that having a
renaissance philosophy of culture leads to cultural intelligence. Further, Hewling gives
the three sources for a personal frame of reference, rooted in the cultural, educational,
and technological locus of the individual. In another article Hewling posits that control of
the learning environment is shared between the instructor as well as,”… users;
software; hardware; the system manager; the system developer; the internet service
provider and all other ‘species’ within the environment ecology”10. This entity, to be
successful, must be a collaboration among contributors and be responsible for their own
component and the interrelationship with other components.
These authors along with the ETEC565G course have provided a cultural
epistemological base for designing and deploying virtual learning environments that will
allow for more sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs of the learner. Two areas
that will be explored in greater depth will be ethical implications relating to cultural
considerations in virtual learning environments and further study on message analysis.
Also, when drafting a virtual learning environment charter prior to design of the online
courses to be offered, one valuable component will be based on this course material
and more specifically the above mentioned authors’ writings relating to culture,
technology, and communication. The aim is to provide a culturally mediated virtual
learning environment that is able to offer differentiated experiences for the diverse
needs of our local school population as well as the students and teachers at other
locations throughout our district.

References:
1. Calgary Separate School District website statistics. Accessed December 5, 2015.
Website: http://www.cssd.ab.ca/schools/
2. International Federation of Robotics (IFR), 2014 report.
Website: http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/
3. Ess, C. (2002). Computer-mediated colonization, the renaissance, and
educational imperatives for an intercultural global village.
 Ethics and Information
Technology; 2002; 4, 1 (11-22).
http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2F
A%3A1015227723904
4. Ess, C. & Sudweeks, F. (2012). Foreword. In P. H. Cheong, J. N. Martin & L. P.
Macfadyen (Eds.), New Media and Intercultural Communication. Identity,
Community and Politics, (pp. xi –xx). New York: Peter Lang.
5. Ess, C. (2009). When the Solution Becomes the Problem: Cultures and
Individuals as Obstacles to Online Learning.
 In M. N. Lamy & R. Goodfellow
(Eds.), Learning Cultures in Online Education (pp. 15-29). UK: Continuum Press.
6. Macfadyen, L. P. (2009).
 Being and learning in the online classroom: Linguistic
practices and ritual text acts. 
In M. N. Lamy & R. Goodfellow (Eds.), Learning
Cultures in Online Education (pp. 93-112). UK: Continuum Press.
7. Macfadyen, L. P. (2006).
Virtual Ethnicity: The new digitization of place, body,
language, and memory.
Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, 8 (1).
http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2006spring/macfayden.html
8. Reeder, K., Macfadyen, L. P., Roche, J. & Chase, M. (2004). Negotiating Culture
in Cyberspace: Participation Patterns and Problematics. Language Learning and
Technology, 8(2), 88-105. http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num2/reeder/default.html
9. Hewling, A. (2005). Culture in the online class: Using message analysis to look
beyond nationality-based frames of reference. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 11(1), article 16.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/hewling.html
10. Hewling, A. (2009). Technology as 'Cultural Player' in Online Learning
Environments.
 In M. N. Lamy & R. Goodfellow (Eds.), Learning Cultures in
Online Education (pp. 113-130). UK: Continuum Press.